He rode all day long across the sweltering desert country, only stopping occasionally to give Cayuse and Mule a blow. After all, where would he be if he killed his animals?
He lost a lot of ground in the beginning because when the Apaches crossed the Colorado River, they waded downriver for nearly two miles before they climbed out of the river. This was a tactic calculated to give them extra time in order for them to make good their escape. It worked because Bryan went up river at first and watched for a place where they climbed out. It was no good. There were no tracks along the river indicating their exit. So after traveling nearly four miles, he had to backtrack and then ride down river looking for a sign. After spending nearly four hours wading up and down the river, he finally found where they had climbed out. Their tracks were very distinct. There were three sets of unshod ponies’ tracks and one set made by the shod lemon silk stallion Amanda was riding. Indians don’t shoe their ponies.
A couple times as he rode across the desert, he spotted the Apaches way off on the horizon, that is to say, he spotted their dust. But he didn’t seem to be closing the gap, and for this, he was in despair.
When the sun slid behind the Western horizon, he had to make camp because he could no longer track them. He hated stopping, but he knew he had to. He was bone-weary from a long day in the saddle, and he needed grub and sleep. He hoped the Apaches would do the same and stop for the night, but there was no telling what they would do because they are notional, and this knowledge preyed upon his mind.
He set up his camp in a defensive position, knowing that Victorio might send one of his bucks back to finish him off while he slept, thus eliminating the danger on their back trail. He slept fitfully through the night as he watched carefully for an attack. He left a little fire burning that he built to cook his food, but he moved his bedroll off into the brush so if an Apache came, the savage would have trouble finding him. Sleeping off in the brush like that presented two problems—the desert gets cold at night, and then, of course, there were rattlesnakes and scorpions to be concerned about. For these reasons, when he got up at the crack of dawn, he felt like he had been run over by an enraged steer. Then, too, there was the knowledge that he’d be facing another brutal day in the saddle. But he decided it was what it was. He knew he was as tough as wang leather and bred to the frontier, so he would do what the situation called for.
He didn’t have any problem following their tracks. There were the three sets of unshod ponies and the shod tracks left by Amanda’s lemon silk stallion. It was obvious they weren’t trying to hide their tracks. They were just simply resolved on covering a lot of ground in a hurry, and they were making a beeline for the Colorado border. Their raid into Utah had pretty much been a failure. Nine of their warriors had been killed, and they didn’t have horses, guns, gold, or foodstuffs to show for their efforts. All they had to show for their foray into Utah was Amanda, and they more than likely were hustling down to Mexico to sell her.
He wondered if the Apaches were taking turns with Amanda, sampling her womanhood. This disturbed his thoughts on a constant basis. Many women captured by Indians and then recovered were never right in the head again. And equally as bad, they never stood a chance of catching a husband and having a family because white men looked at them as being tainted . Dang the little fool . Why couldn’t she have just stayed in La Sal?
Instead of veering east and cutting over into Colorado as Bryan had hoped the Apaches would do, they turned and headed straight south, down into Arizona. At that juncture, it wasn’t extremely important to Bryan because his main objective was to save Amanda. But he sort of hoped they would ride east into Colorado, giving him a chance to reclaim Amanda. Then he could, with some facility, ride to the Picketwire in Colorado and get after Ed Muir—bank robber, murderer, human scum.
Bryan intended to stop in Blanding and buy a few supplies. For all he knew, he might have to trail the Apaches all the way into Mexico and he would need to stock up. But the Apaches skirted around Blanding and kept on going south.
Bryan tracked the Apaches until the lighting got so bad, he couldn’t follow their tracks. So he found a little alcove in a cliff face and made camp. This camp was a lot more secure than the one he had set up the previous evening. He was able to get a good night’s sleep, and it was something he really needed. Bryan figured Cayuse and Mule would alert him if anyone tried to sneak up on him.
The next morning, he woke up energized and took after the Apaches at first light. The day to follow was the hardest one yet. The sun beat down with unrelenting intensity, and early in the afternoon, he got into a windstorm and had to ride into a little recess in a cliff face and wait it out. He put his neckerchief over his mouth and eyes, and he wrapped burlap sacks around Cayuse’s and Mule’s faces to protect them from the ferocious windstorm. He got sand in his eyes and they turned beet red; his mouth also filled with sand. When he had a lunch of hardtack, jerky, and brackish water, his teeth crunched with sand. But he didn’t worry a whole lot about the time spent waiting out the storm because he knew the Apaches had to do the same.
He figured if he couldn’t run the Apaches down before they crossed the Arizona border, he would have to follow them down into Mexico. And if a man did that, there was the potential for causing an international incident. But he didn’t care. Surely, the authorities would understand. After all, he was chasing down Apaches who kidnapped a territorial girl—a territory that was part and parcel of the United States. But then he realized that was wishful thinking. Mexican Federales, at least most of them, were so corrupt, there was no telling what trouble he would get into if they caught him. They might commandeer his money, and he was carrying nearly five thousand dollars he had earned collecting bounties just before he met Amanda. Or they might throw him in prison. Even worse, they could put him in front of a firing squad. Whatever it was, he didn’t care. He was going after the girl no matter what, even if she was a headstrong little ninny.
As he rode along, he tried to second-guess where in Mexico they would take the girl. Finally, he figured they would ride about 250 miles into the state of Sonora to a city named Cocorit. He knew there was a thriving sex slave market there. Yes, that seemed like the logical place, but with Apaches, there was no telling. Who knows, they might just use her all up and slit her throat.
Thinking on that prompted him to give Cayuse a little steel to his ribs and run him up to a short trot for a couple miles. Cayuse and Mule seemed to be doing fine—even though he had been running them hard for the last few days—but he figured he could short-trot them for a couple miles without any ill-effects. Both animals were bred for the desert, and for that, he was thankful. But then, of course, he took good care of them and saw to it they got plenty of water and feed. The southeastern reaches of Utah seemed to have an abundance of water and nice patches of grass because the San Juan River and tributaries, as well as several other waterways, were located there.
Bryan figured that if the Apaches dipped down into Mexico, they would probably go to Cocorit in the municipality of Cajeme, State of Sonora. Cocorit was founded in 1617 by Jesuit priests named Andres Perez de Ribas and Tomas Basilia. In the beginning, it was a mission that was a place of sanctuary for the devout, but over the centuries, it had descended into a state of degradation. It had become a hangout for Mexican bandits raiding up into Arizona, and for murderers, thieves, pickpockets, whoremongers, and flimflam artists of every type. Bryan dreaded going there, but he would if that’s where the chase led him.
On towards evening, he spotted smoke up ahead. He couldn’t tell the source of it because it was coming from behind a little rise on the horizon. Once he got to the top of the rise, his heart sank. It was a settler’s wagon that was burning, and even from off in the distance, Bryan could see several bodies littered along the ground. He knew it had to be the handiwork of the Apaches he was trailing, the degenerate heathens.
An older man was strung up from a tree branch with a lariat. He had an arrow protruding from his che
st, his eyes had been cut out. It was enough to make a man lose his lunch. There was a woman sprawled on a nearby patch of sand, naked. It was obvious the filthy swine had availed themselves of her womanliness before they killed her by slitting her throat. She had been scalped. Then Bryan actually did lose his lunch, and that soon developed into the dry heaves. He knew it was a sight that would haunt him the rest of his days. He had seen plenty of dead people before, but they hadn’t been mutilated like these hapless souls. They had sliced off the woman’s breasts, and the reason behind that would have to remain a mystery. He suspected it was done out of pure cussedness.
He walked down to a nearby creek to cleanse the bile from his throat and have a cool drink. He found a little girl down there sprawled on the ground and quite dead. They had taken a knife to her and done unspeakable things. She appeared to be about ten years old, and she, too, had been molested. Next, he found a little boy about four years old. He had also been killed and mutilated.
He went back and searched through the wagon. He found perfectly good foodstuff that he placed into his panniers because he knew he was in for the long haul. This chase might take months, and he hadn’t been able to stock up on supplies in Blanding. He confiscated the food because he knew the people strewn about on the ground and the one hanging from a tree wouldn’t be needing it anymore.
The wagon was badly burned, but some of its contents were in perfectly good condition. He found a battered Brown-Merrill .577 caliber rifle. The Brown-Merrill was manufactured in Britain and had been used in the War Between the States. It was a percussion rifle and had been a poor performer. But after the war, the Browning Firearms Company had converted thousands of the British pattern to a rifle that fired metal cartridges with the use of a rolling block. The rifle was battered, but the settler had kept it clean and obviously in good working order. So Bryan stuck it in an extra boot he was carrying and draped it off Mule. It was a rifle that could come in handy if he had to reach out to an Apache some 500 or so yards away just to say hello. Here, sir, is my calling card. Getting hit with a .570 grain bullet is almost like getting smacked with a cannonball. It does frightful things to the human body.
He took the time to roll all of the bodies into a nearby cut bank and then cave it in on top of them. Then he piled the mass grave with lots of boulders to keep the carrion eaters at bay. Under the circumstances, it was the best he could do. Next, he built them a cross from a couple of ragged boards and scratched “Killed by Indians.” He didn’t have names because he couldn’t find identification. The only things he located in the man’s trousers was a pocket knife and forty dollars. He couldn’t figure how they expected to settle into a new and untamed land with only forty dollars. It’s possible the Apaches stole a wad of their money but unlikely. Most generally, Indians have no use for money, or gold, either, for that matter.
There was another distressing matter that preyed on Bryan’s mind. While he was interring the bodies into the mass grave, he noticed an unmistakable bulge in the woman’s stomach. There was no denying it; she was pregnant. He had considered cutting her open to see if the baby were still alive. But several disturbing facts stood in the way of that: the lady had been dead too long, the pregnancy wasn’t far enough along, and even if he could rescue a live baby, there was no way he could have kept it alive without milk.
It was apparent the settlers only had two mules pulling their Conestoga because the load wasn’t all that heavy. The Apaches had taken the mules along with them, and they would kill them when they needed meat. An Indian will ride a horse into the ground and then kill and butcher it for the meat. There’s no sentimentality at play there.
Just before Bryan set out on the trail again, he took one last look into the wagon. What he discovered angered him further. He looked in a little steamer trunk and found dresses, petticoats, and underthings for a young girl. Judging by the size of the clothing, he guessed they would fit a girl at around 12 years old. That accounted for the one saddle horse the settlers had been trailing behind the wagon. The Indians had mounted the little girl on the horse and taken her along. That meant they had more female flesh to dally with and use up, or sell into the slave market, presumably in Cocorit, Mexico.
Bryan climbed aboard Cayuse and took one last lingering look at the massacre site. It was yet another chapter written in the Westward movement. But to the people stacked into that cut bank grave, it was more than that—it was highly personal. It was the final chapter in their lives and the end of all of their hopes and dreams. Further, it truncated their lineage. Yes, it was the final curtain call for them, and it was profoundly sad.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Later that day, Bryan rode into a Mormon community by the name of Bluff. It came by its name honestly because it was nestled among three-hundred-foot sandstone bluffs. A channel cut through the sandstone by the San Juan River. Before he rode into the community, he filled his canteens at the river and gave his animals a drink.
The river rushed between the bluffs with seeming fury. It had raged through there on a steady basis over the millennia with even greater volume and ferocity showing presently because the banks were strewn with huge boulders and tree branches.
Here again—and just recently—Brigham Young had sent settlers to Bluff to settle it and build industry. Burdened with their cumbersome wagons, the 280-mile trip down from Salt Lake had taken five months for them because they had to wind their way through some of the most difficult terrain on earth—Utah’s Canyonlands. Using dynamite, they had blasted away a small passage through a cliff face and lowered their wagons down by ropes. It was the only way to get down the cliff. This was the aforementioned Hole-in-the-Wall site, and the trail from Salt Lake to Bluff would become known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Trail. The Mormons found life at Bluff difficult. The soil was marginally good, the isolation was problematic, and the heat was stultifying. But eventually, the Mormons found a way to make the region pay off. They built a cattle cooperative.
Bryan hated to spend the time in Bluff, but he needed a few more supplies. Besides, it was nearing evening, and he could do with a bath, grub not cooked by himself, and a feather bed.
He boarded his animals at a livery stable and made certain they were properly cared for. Then he sauntered over to a general store/saloon. A wooden plank over the door had General Store burned deeply into the wood with a branding iron.
An old man was behind the counter in a ladder-backed chair, asleep and snoring loudly. Bryan reached over the counter and gave his shoulder a shake. The old man had a full mop of snow-white hair, and he was outfitted in a gabardine shirt and homespun, woolen trousers held up by galluses. His one outstanding feature was his nose. It was long, narrow, and shaped like a ski jump. “Howdy there, young feller,” he said. “I wasn’t asleep. I was just checkin’ the inside of my eyelids for holes.”
“Sure, old timer, if you say so,” Bryan said.
“What can I help you with?”
“Give me a pencil and paper, and I’ll write out an order that you can have ready for me in the morning. In the meantime, I need a bath, grub, and a feather bed.”
“Young feller, you’ll have to go across the street to that boardin’ house for the bath, grub, and bed, but I can fill your order for the supplies, and I’m happy to do it. Business has been a little slow here lately.”
Bryan looked the old man over very closely. “You don’t look so good. What is the matter with you? You look hung over, and you smell like a brewery.”
“Dagnabbit, how’d you know? These consarned Mormons with all them strict laws and that Word of Wisdom thing are drivin’ me crazy. I don’t know why I settled here.”
“So how do your hangover and the Mormons fit in?”
“I decided to forget about them this mornin’, and I got drunker than a hoot owl. I broke their stupid Word of Wisdom all to pieces.” He laughed at his own wit.
“Drunker than a hoot owl?” Bryan pondered that statement, scratched his head, then laughed. “I wasn’t aw
are that hoot owls drank all that much.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” the old man said.
“I suppose. What’s your name?”
“Fred Dourche, but most people forget my name and just call me asshole.” The old man laughed uproariously.
Bryan couldn’t even manage a smile at that one.
Fred stopped laughing abruptly. “What, you don’t think that’s funny?”
“No.”
“Well, okay, sorry. Are you Mormon?”
“No.”
“Are you a Catholic priest?”
“No. I’m just a man who only laughs at good humor.”
“Well, okay, then you are a stick-in-the-mud. But I’ll have your order ready.” Once Fred made that declaration, he reached behind the counter and brought out a can of bicarbonate of soda and a bottle of Dr. Corby’s Hangover Cure. He took a couple swigs of each.
“So what are you taking there, Fred, laudanum? Are you a dope fiend?”
“No, and I am not a drunk, either. I just take a snort or two every now and then.”
“If you say so, Fred.”
“You know there, young feller, if I was younger I’d. . . .”
“You’d what?”
“I’d just forget about doin’ business with you and jerk some knots on your danged head.”
Bryan laughed. “Calm down, old timer. I don’t have a problem with you. You seem like a pretty good old feller. You’re just not too good with a joke.”
Fred laughed. It broke the tension. He stuck his hand out, and Bryan gave it a shake. “Say, what’s your name anyway?” Fred asked.
“Bryan Probst.”
“Bryan Probst? By any chance, do you hail from Midway, up there in beautiful Heber Valley? Are you Kid Utah?”
“I am.”
“And to think I was just now threatenin’ to jerk some knots on your head. You didn’t take that personal, did you?”
“No, Fred, I didn’t. Besides, I only shoot people who rightly deserve it.”
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